Squat Big, Win Games?

“Strength is a great base for your athletic performance, but it won’t be the cherry on top as well. Once you have that strength base, adding another 5kg to your squat or deadlift probably won’t go as far as sprints, jumps, throws and other power work”

Me – Tuesday.

I’m here to give you some more context to the social post I put up this week about how speed kills in sport, and while strength is an underpinning physical quality, it’s not the be all and end add of sports specific athletic training.

Here’s 3 things to consider when understanding why barbell strength may not be everything.

1) Appreciating Speed and Power

Speed = Distance / Time

Or how quickly an object covers a distance. In sport the object is most often the athlete themselves, and we usually measure speed in meters per second.

To create any movement of an object, you need an external force to overcome the inertia of that object. The quicker the force the faster the movement, which leads us to:

Power = Force x Velocity

In all of this, force is the measurable quality of strength.

So like I said, strength is a great base for athletic performance. But to create maximal power and therefore the speed that is likely to kill in sport, you also need velocity.

If you’re a young athlete with very little muscle mass and background in lifting weights, increasing your strength will have a huge pay-out. The force in that power equation will increase rapidly, so power itself will increase, and likely your performance will too.

But if you are already strong and squatting 1.5-2x your bodyweight or deadlifting 2-2.5x your bodyweight, the returns on performance really start to diminish.

To understand why you have to start looking at the velocity part of that force equation, and learn how to apply all that force you have, quicker.

2) Velocity Based Training (VBT) and the Force Velocity Curve

When lifting heavy weights in the gym at 80-100% of your 1RM (so essentially working at 6 reps or less), your bar speed is going to be less than 0.5ms.

Take some weight off, and you’ll be able to move the bar at a quicker speed. This is the basic principle of VBT and focussing on specific points of the force velocity curve.

80-100% 1RM <0.5ms Absolute Strength

70% 1RM 0.75-0.5ms Accelerative Strength

50-60% 1RM 1-0.75ms Speed Strength

30-40% 1RM 1.3-1ms Speed Strength

10-20% 1RM >1.3ms Starting Strength

If you solely work your absolute strength at 80%1RM and above, always moving barbells at less than 0.5ms, you get really good at moving heavy objects slowly. You don’t necessarily get good at moving lighter things quickly. Adaptations are always specific to the demand.

Instead, what you would benefit from more, is “surfing the force velocity curve”, and improving all of the above qualities to an extent to develop a fast, powerful and strong athlete.

3) Beyond the Curve

What the force velocity curve doesn’t give us is anything about unloaded movement and reactive strength, which are huge parts of sports and athleticism.

Reactive strength is how quickly an athlete can transition from an eccentric contraction (landing) to a concentric contraction (re-acceleration), utilising the stretch-shortening cycle, creating maximal forces in minimal time, and is measured by the reactive strength index.

A huge part of this is ground contact time, with shorter ground contact times being linked to fast sprint and acceleration speeds and also higher jump heights.

Now let’s go right back to the start and think of our ground contact time in a set of 5 on the back squat at 85%. From your last un-racking step to your first re-racking step could be 20-30 seconds.

Below is the rough ground contact times of a few common “athletic” movements:

Top Speed Sprinting: 0.1ms

Steps 1-3 Acceleration: 0.2-0.15ms

Depth Jump Landing: 0.35ms

90 Degree Cut: 0.35ms

What I’m saying is they are worlds apart.

To be truly athletic and be able to accelerate, sprint, jump and change direction successfully, you will need to tap into reactive strength. To do this you will need to incorporate plyometric movements, including accelerations and sprints.

Summary

To bring this all together, great athletes can do all of the above.

They can move heavy weight and have good absolute strength. This helps them apply and resist force at the basic level.

But they can move lighter weights quickly too, likely all along the force velocity curve.

They can also move their own body through space quickly, in a variety of planes, utilising their reactive strength to sprint, jump, accelerate and change direction.

Different sports and different positions have different focusses, and these should be catered to, but sports are games of inches, and split seconds are often the difference between success and failure, winning and losing.

Speed kills.

Ian